On Oysters

The first time I ever had an oyster was with my then boyfriend and now husband (henceforth referred to as John)at Felix's on Bourbon Street. It was my freshman year in college, during September. My friend R had come with us. This trip has many huge memories: running through the downpour holding stuffed pandas, my father's anger at being unable to keep me from going, R's terrible, terrible snoring, sleeping in the same bed with someone I loved for the first time. But the oyster is powerful.

I had ordered some sort of po'boy I'm sure, given my love for hot sandwiches, but John had ordered a dozen oysters on the half shell. Having grown up with a father who refers to such things as "boogers," I had never eaten one. John offered me one, and feeling brave, I accepted. I watched his method of preparing the oyster: saltine, oyster, horseradish, tabasco. Bite. Chew. Swallow. I followed his lead, and thoroughly enjoyed myself. Thus began one of my favorite of our food adventures.

Of course, at this point, the oyster just tasted like a chewy piece of spicy slime. The texture is an acquired taste. Oysters are bivalves, and edible ones do not make pearls. The first person to pry one open and slurp down the contents was truly brave, and truly a gourmet. Oysters are allegedly aphrodisiacs, an interesting allegation. They are not particularly phallic, like some aphrodisiacs, and it might take a bit of a stretch to imagine them as vaginal. But the experience of eating an oyster, and just an oyster, is highly erotic.

I first experienced this in Ireland. In 2007, in May, John and I went on a whim. We have a habit of doing fairly objectively stupid things on a whim. (This will come up in other entries on shellfish.) Our last night in the country, in Limerick and ordered a plate of oysters. They came, in big shells full of salty brine, with no offered condiments, no horseradish, no lemon, certainly no tabasco. The muscle had been gently separated from the shell, and no utensils were needed. One simply poured the oyster, brine and all, into one's mouth.

How decadent. How divine. The brine tasting, of course, of the ocean, and the sweetness of the oyster came through cleanly, without hiding beneath sugary cocktail sauce, or too much heat. The feel of my lips on the shell was so odd, and it has become one of those sense memories that makes me insistent that we should actually touch our food, at least as we prepare it.

Certainly the experience was imperfect: the brine dribbled down the chin, bits of shell and grit slid into the mouth while slurping the oyster. As with any raw, or only lightly cooked, food, there is a risk of illness and disease, although with oysters this risk is more due to what we do to our oceans than to the inherent nature of the oyster itself. But isn't that really what the erotic is? Salt and sweet. Messy. Noisy. Risky. A state of heightened sensory experience. When we don't cover our food, it can feel the same as when we uncover ourselves. Certainly we might end up regretting it, but our lives would be so much more empty if we did not do it.

And now, when I eat oysters, as I did last night at Trios, it is rarely without my husband, and it is always with the knowledge that there is a lot of possibility in this food: raw, bare, with a variety of choices for eating (we were offered crackers, crostini, and cocktail sauce at Trios). What matters most to our experience of the oyster is that we try all the choices, even the ones that are the simplest. It sounds contrived, and it's a poor way of saying what I mean: oysters are important because they offer us the chance to really adventure. They are sexy, they are disgusting, they are risky, they are delicious.